By JASON COHEN (Daily Caller News Foundation)
NewsNation host Chris Cuomo on Friday ridiculed Vice President Kamala Harris’ skill level following a gaffe she made in her economic speech.
Harris, during the Friday afternoon speech in North Carolina, announced her plan to impose a federal ban on so-called “price gouging,” but said “gauging” instead of “gouging.” Cuomo said he doesn’t “care” about the gaffe, but suggested Harris exemplifies the lack of “talent in our politics right now.”
“Price gauging versus gouging, she made a mistake. We noted it … I don’t really care about gouging, gauging. I don’t care, alright? You got to take the level of talent where you find it,” Cuomo said. “We don’t have great talent in our politics right now. We got to wait for better people to want to get involved in what is such a poison process. But this is who we got.”
Harris said she would “go after the bad actors” who unethically raise prices, asserting when businesses don’t play “by the rules,” the government must “take action,” according to NBC News.
CNN anchor Julia Chatterley on Thursday said Harris’ speech was appealing to voters, but thin on details, taking aim at the vice president’s “price gouging” plan.
“I just don’t know how that federal ban is going to work. If they’re talking about directly targeting prices, it will require some form of act of Congress. Isolating how and where price gouging is taking place is very difficult. Chatterley said. “She talked about the profits of grocery stores, their margins are incredibly thin. For every dollar sale, they make profits of around one to three cents. Just try proving that their price gouging is going to be incredibly difficult beyond anything else.”
While Harris has placed blame on corporate price gouging for elevated prices, economists assert corporate behavior has not impacted rising food costs as significantly as government stimulus efforts and low interest rates imposed by the Federal Reserve, The New York Times reported.
Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell on Friday also criticized Harris’ economic plans to mitigate high prices, particularly the vice president’s “price gouging” agenda.
“Nobody can explain what price gouging means. It’s like that old line about pornography, ‘I know it when I see it,’ in the sense that what does it mean to have an excessive price or an excessive profit margin? That seems to be shorthand for, ‘A price or profit margin that bugs me,’ that seems too high,” Rampell said.
“We’ve seen this kind of thing tried in lots of other countries before: Venezuela, Argentina, the Soviet Union, etc.; it leads to shortages, it leads to black markets, plenty of uncertainty and beyond that, the specific way this bill is written might actually increase prices because of some of the other language in it,” she added. “Things like requiring companies, public companies, to disclose in their quarterly reports the quarterly earnings reports how they’re setting prices, which is a great way to help them collude, which normally we don‘t want them to do.”
